Publishing from the pulpit: Connecticut rabbis featured in new books
By Cindy Mindell
As if pulpit rabbis didn’t have enough on their congregational plates, many are also published authors. This year, two Connecticut rabbis contributed to new books, bringing years of personal and professional experience to their respective topics.
Rabbi Carl Astor of Congregation Beth El in New London wrote a chapter on the Jewish lifecycle in “The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews,” edited by Rabbi Martin S. Cohen and Rabbi Michael Katz and published in April by the Rabbinical Assembly.
The book expands the classic work of Isaac Klein’s 1979 “A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice.” Based on the premise that the norms of Jewish spirituality and observance apply to areas generally considered unrelated to religious practice, “The Observant Life” features chapters on the way halacha influences the way Jews actually live in and interact with the world.
Rabbi Andrew Sklarz of Greenwich Reform Synagogue wrote “Spiraling Down and Up the Staircase: The Descent of Dementia and the Ascent That Follows,” a chapter in “Broken Fragments: Jewish Experiences of Alzheimer’s Disease through Diagnosis, Adaptation, and Moving On,” edited by Rabbi Douglas J. Kohn and published in June by URJ Press.
The book’s title comes from a story in the Talmud that describes how Moses shattered the first set of Ten Commandments, destroying them along with the Golden Calf – yet he did not discard the tablets’ broken fragments. The Talmud teaches, “Respect the aged, because the fragments of the original tablets were preserved in the Ark with the new ones” (Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 8b). The book’s editor and authors approach Alzheimer’s disease as a “human set of broken fragments.”
Rabbi Carl Astor was invited to contribute to the new volume on Jewish observance by friend and colleague Martin Cohen because of Astor’s previous book, “Who Makes People Different? Jewish Perspectives on the Disabled” (United Synagogue of America, Dept. of Youth Activities, 1985). Astor is also a mohel.
The goal of the book’s contributors was to create a work that was not only a reference, Astor says, but a “readable” sourcebook reflecting the many changes in Conservative Judaism over the last 30 years — like egalitarianism, medical ethics, and same-sex marriage.
“It’s an evolving process, a balance,” Astor says of Conservative observance. ”When changes are made, they have to reflect two things: what is going on in society, and the legal foundations for the change.”
For example, there may be a change that makes sense legally but that will not be accepted by the Conservative community. Many years ago, the movement’s law committee decided that observing two days of the Jewish holidays was no longer necessary. A ruling was issued, allowing individual congregations to decide for themselves, with the expectation that within five or 10 years, all Conservative synagogues would transition to the one-day observance. But today, many of those congregations still hold to the two-day tradition.
On the other hand, Astor says, there are issues that bear a strong legal basis for making a change, but the community is not seeking change, and the movement must take that into account. To wit: homosexuality.
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